If you like your lunacy straight and undiluted, think of a drink called the Sidney Powell. I just now invented it. It should look like a Shirley Temple, except green, but it should pack the kick of a mule, let’s say Tennessee sour mash whiskey, creme de menthe, and ground up Norco. And an orange slice and three maraschino cherries. Serve it in a copper mug so that when you fall off the bar stool you won’t break it and hurt yourself.
Jonathan Karl’s new book is filled with tasty anecdotes but one that really sizzles is the one Powell told about then-CIA Director Gina Haspel. Powell said that Haspel undertook a secret undercover international mission to recover hard evidence of the stolen election.
“Gina Haspel has been hurt and taken into custody in Germany,” Powell told Cohen, pushing a false conspiracy theory that had been gaining steam among QAnon followers, according to the book. “You need to launch a special operations mission to get her,” Powell said.
Powell, according to the book, was pushing the outlandish claim that Haspel had been injured while on a secret CIA operation to seize an election-related computer server that belonged to a company named Scytl – none of which was true.
“The server, Powell claimed, contained evidence that hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of votes had been switched using rigged voting machines. Powell believed Haspel had embarked on this secret mission to get the server and destroy the evidence – in other words, the CIA director was part of the conspiracy,” Karl writes.
Powell wanted the Defense Department to send a special operations team over to Germany immediately: “They needed to get the server and force Haspel to confess,” Karl writes.
Powell’s theory has a number of flaws. Perhaps the most glaring is her premise that the agent the CIA would select to carry out its secret mission would be the agency’s director. My understanding of the espionage world is that secret agents generally try to escape recognition. Maintaining your cover is considerably more difficult if you have appeared on television and in newspapers across the world identified as the director of the CIA.
Anyway, Powell is crazier than Giuliani, who is crazier than Barr. At some point toward the very end, things got so crazy even Barr couldn’t handle it anymore. But Barr’s grip on reality is quite tenuous. The mental-health spectrum of Trump lawyer crazy runs from Fox News Brain (Barr) to Newsmax Brain (Giuliani) to One America News Brain (Powell). Say what you will about Trump’s managerial style — his legal team has truly been a Big Tent.
Another first, ladies and gentlemen. When else in the history of our nation do you recall an analysis being made of the relative sanity of “all the presidents’ men?” I don’t think Barr is the least bit unhinged. I think he has a keen sense of what he can and can’t get away with and he acts accordingly. The rest of them are absolutely out there and frankly, in a contest between Powell and Giuliani, who’s the most deranged, I think it’s a dead heat. Giuliani has the excuse of alcohol rotting his brain, but Powell will not need to drink too many of the concoction bearing her name to catch right up with him.
When else do I recall anything this weird? Never. Not ever. Nope.